@TheEdVerse I've been wondering, for some time, about different materials in different worlds. What would a real-world chemist make of a piece of mithril or admantine? What would a well-regarded Faerunian wizard discover from a bit of tungsten or titanium?
— Stochastic.Questioner (@RandomQueriant) February 5, 2022
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This is something left to DMs for shaping their own campaigns. With Roger Zelazny’s blessing, I borrowed his idea that substances worked differently in different worlds (the title of “The Guns of Avalon,” his second Amber novel, refers to jeweler’s rouge, not… 2)
…gunpowder, explodes in Amber) for the Realms. So I planted the principle but left the details fuzzy so a DM can vary what things do from place to place because it affects gate/portal mercantile traffic (and wars, and so geopolitics).
I can tell you, from…#Realmslore— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) February 5, 2022
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…established Realmslore, that mithril and adamantine (the refined alloys) behave more or less the same on Earth as in the Realms, and that an Earth chemist would be able to tell they were alloys, but involving unknown-to-them main ingredients. Most mages of… 4)
…Faerûn devote so much time to spellcraft that they tend to approach metals they encounter in either the rock-bottom-practical sense (this takes a cutting edge and is hard = good knife) or the experimental one (what happens if I try to use this as a spell…#Realmslore— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) February 5, 2022
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…component?). So I left things deliberately fuzzy, and TSR left such lore alone because they wanted to avoid the whole subject of links between the real world and their game worlds, during what we now call “the Satanic Panic.”
However, we had many fun debates… 6)
…and speculations at GenCons and my annual around-a-GenCon TSR visits, and they spawned features of other settings and adventures. I still think this should be left to DMs as a Big Underpinning of a campaign, like überplots.#Realmslore— Ed Greenwood (@TheEdVerse) February 5, 2022